THE BAUMAN STORY

Presidential frontiersmen "Rough-rider" Teddy Roosevelt began writing his
soon to be published book in 1890. Titled The Wilderness Hunter, the author
writes of a grizzled, weather beaten trapper by the name of Bauman, whose
figure of a man reminded me of actor Robert Redford's portrayal of the
legendary woodsman-tracker Jeremiah Johnson. Bauman however was German
born, lived all of his life out on the early frontier. Roosevelt must have
had some degree of belief in Bauman's tale to include his thoughts in his
book.

Before his legendary encounter, Roger Patterson wrote in his 1966 book, Do
Abominable Snowmen of America Really Exist that, "He [Roosevelt] was a hard
man to fool with a wild tale." Bauman must have held to the story for it
was said that he could hardly repress a shudder at certain points in the
yarn. A yarn that was to become a legend at Roosevelt's unwitting
recounting, weathering the retelling for more than 100 years and will go
on ad infinitum.

One of Idaho's best known horror stories, it tells the story of two trappers
who set out on a beaver hunt in the still remote alpine terrain of the
beautiful Salmon River countryside. This portion of the Salmon River is
located in the Bitterroot Mountains between the state of Idaho and Montana.
To this day, stories of the Sasquatch come out of this part of this virgin
wilderness. Roosevelt wrote that the previous year a trapper's body had
been found torn to bits and partially eaten by an "unknown beast, which left
enormous human foot tracks in its wake." [Bears do not leave human
footprints; overlapping bear tracks upon one another can be differentiated.]

Oblivious to what should have been a warning to the senses, these two men
journeyed deep into the wilderness' remote regions, moving campsites from
one creek to another in search of satisfactory places in which to place
their beaver traps. Here is that famous excerpt about Bauman from
Roosevelt's book:

"Frontiersmen are not, as a rule, apt to be very superstitious. They lead
lives too hard and practical, and have too little imagination in things
spiritual and supernatural. I have heard but few ghost stories while living
on the frontier, and those few were of a perfectly commonplace and
conventional type. But I once listened to a goblin-story, which rather
impressed me.

A grizzled, weather beaten old mountain hunter, named Bauman who, born and
had passed all of his life on the Frontier, told it the story to me. He must
have believed what he said, for he could hardly repress a shudder at certain
points of the tale; but he was of German ancestry, and in childhood had
doubtless been saturated with all kinds of ghost and goblin lore. So that
many fearsome superstitions were latent in his mind; besides, he knew well
the stories told by the Indian medicine men in their winter camps, of the
snow-walkers, and the specters, [spirits, ghosts & apparitions] the formless
evil beings that haunt the forest depths, and dog and waylay the lonely
wanderer who after nightfall passes through the regions where they lurk. It
may be that when overcome by the horror of the fate that befell his friend,
and when oppressed by the awful dread of the unknown, he grew to attribute,
both at the time and still more in remembrance, weird and elfin traits to
what was merely some abnormally wicked and cunning wild beast; but whether
this was so or not, no man can say.

When the event occurred, Bauman was still a young man, and was trapping with
a partner among the mountains dividing the forks of the Salmon from the head
of Wisdom River. Not having had much luck, he and his partner determined to
go up into a particularly wild and lonely pass through which ran a small
stream said to contain many beavers. The pass had an evil reputation because
the year before a solitary hunter who had wandered into it was slain,
seemingly by a wild beast, the half eaten remains being afterwards found by
some mining prospectors who had passed his camp only the night before.

The memory of this event, however, weighted very lightly with the two
trappers, who were as adventurous and hardy as others of their kind. They
took their two lean mountain ponies to the foot of the pass where they left
them in an open beaver meadow, the rocky timber-clad ground being from there
onward impracticable for horses. They then struck out on foot through the
vast, gloomy forest, and in about four hours reached a little open glade
where they concluded to camp, as signs of game were plenty.

There was still an hour or two of daylight left, and after building a brush
lean-to and throwing down and opening their packs, they started upstream.
The country was very dense and hard to travel through, as there was much
down timber, although here and there the somber woodland was broken by small
glades of mountain grass. At dusk they again reached camp. The glade in
which it was pitched was not many yards wide, the tall, close-set pines and
firs rising round it like a wall. On one side was a little stream, beyond
which rose the steep mountains slope, covered with the unbroken growth of
evergreen forest.

They were surprised to find that during their absence something, apparently
a bear, had visited camp, and had rummaged about among their things,
scattering the contents of their packs, and in sheer wantonness destroying
their lean-to. The footprints of the beast were quite plain, but at first
they paid no particular heed to them, busying themselves with rebuilding the
lean-to, laying out their beds and stores and lighting the fire.

While Bauman was making ready supper, it being already dark, his companion
began to examine the tracks more closely, and soon took a brand from the
fire to follow them up, where the intruder had walked along a game trail
after leaving the camp. When the brand flickered out, he returned and took
another, repeating his inspection of the footprints very closely. Coming
back to the fire, he stood by it a minute or two, peering out into the
darkness, and suddenly remarked, "Bauman, that bear has been walking on two
legs."

Bauman laughed at this, but his partner insisted that he was right, and upon
again examining the tracks with a torch, they certainly did seem to be made
by but two paws or feet. However, it was too dark to make sure. After
discussing whether the footprints could possibly be those of a human being,
and coming to the conclusion that they could not be, the two men rolled up
in their blankets, and went to sleep under the lean-to. At midnight Bauman
was awakened by some noise, and sat up in his blankets. As he did so his
nostrils were struck by a strong, wild-beast odor, and he caught the loom of
a great body in the darkness at the mouth of the lean-to. Grasping his
rifle, he fired at the vague, threatening shadow, but must have missed, for
immediately afterwards he heard the smashing of the under wood as the thing,
whatever it was, rushed off into the impenetrable blackness of the forest
and the night.

After this the two men slept but little, sitting up by the rekindled fire,
but they heard nothing more. In the morning they started out to look at the
few traps they had set the previous evening and put out new ones. By an
unspoken agreement they kept together all day, and returned to camp towards
evening. On nearing it they saw, hardly to their astonishment that the
lean-to had again been torn down. The visitor of the preceding day had
returned, and in wanton malice had tossed about their camp kit and bedding,
and destroyed the shanty. The ground was marked up by its tracks, and on
leaving the camp it had gone along the soft earth by the brook. The
footprints were as plain as if on snow, and, after a careful scrutiny of the
trail, it certainly did seem as if, whatever the thing was, it had walked
off on but two legs.

The men, thoroughly uneasy, gathered a great heap of dead logs and kept up a
roaring fire throughout the night, one or the other sitting on guard most of
the time. About midnight the thing came down through the forest opposite,
across the brook, and stayed there on the hillside for nearly an hour. They
could hear the branches crackle as it moved about, and several times it
uttered a harsh, grating, long-drawn moan, a peculiarly sinister sound. Yet
it did not venture near the fire. In the morning the two trappers, after
discussing the strange events of the last 36 hours, decided that they would
shoulder their packs and leave the valley that afternoon. They were the more
ready to do this because in spite of seeing a good deal of game sign they
had caught very little fur. However it was necessary first to go along the
line of their traps and gather them, and this they started out to do. All
the morning they kept together, picking up trap after trap, each one empty.
On first leaving camp they had the disagreeable sensation of being followed.
In the dense spruce thickets they occasionally heard a branch snap after
they had passed; and now and then there were slight rustling noises among
the small pines to one side of them.

At noon they were back within a couple of miles of camp. In the high, bright
sunlight their fears seemed absurd to the two armed men, accustomed as they
were, through long years of lonely wandering in the wilderness, to face
every kind of danger from man, brute or element. There were still three
beaver traps to collect from a little pond in a wide ravine near by. Bauman
volunteered to gather these and bring them in, while his companion went
ahead to camp and made ready the packs.

On reaching the pond Bauman found three beavers in the traps, one of which
had been pulled loose and carried into a beaver house. He took several hours
in securing and preparing the beaver, and when he started homewards he
marked, with some uneasiness, how low the sun was getting. As he hurried
toward camp, under the tall trees, the silence and desolation of the forest
weighted on him. His feet made no sound on the pine needles and the slanting
sunrays, striking through among the straight trunks, made a gray twilight in
which objects at a distance glimmered indistinctly. There was nothing to
break the gloomy stillness which, when there is no breeze, always broods
over these somber primeval forests. At last he came to the edge of the
little glade where the camp lay and shouted as he approached it, but got no
answer. The campfire had gone out, though the thin blue smoke was still
curling upwards.

Near it lay the packs wrapped and arranged. At first Bauman could see
nobody; nor did he receive an answer to his call. Stepping forward he again
shouted, and as he did so his eye fell on the body of his friend, stretched
beside the trunk of a great fallen spruce. Rushing towards it the horrified
trapper found that the body was still warm, but that the neck was broken,
while there were four great fang marks in the throat.
The footprints of the unknown beast-creature, printed deep in the soft soil,
told the whole story. The unfortunate man, having finished his packing, had
sat down on the spruce log with his face to the fire, and his back to the
dense woods, to wait for his companion. While thus waiting, his monstrous
assailant, which must have been lurking in the woods, waiting for a chance
to catch one of the adventurers unprepared, came silently up from behind,
walking with long noiseless steps and seemingly still on two legs.
Evidently unheard, it reached the man, and broke his neck by wrenching his
head back with its fore paws, while it buried its teeth in his throat. It
had not eaten the body, but apparently had romped and gamboled around it in
uncouth, ferocious glee, occasionally rolling over and over it; and had then
fled back into the soundless depths of the woods.

Bauman, utterly unnerved and believing that the creature with which he had
to deal was something either half human or half devil, some great
goblin-beast, abandoned everything but his rifle and struck off at speed
down the pass, not halting until he reached the beaver meadows where the
hobbled ponies were still grazing. Mounting, he rode onwards through the
night, until beyond reach of pursuit."

There is by the way, a second passage in The Wilderness Hunter where Teddy
Roosevelt may quite possibly have been describing a personal Bigfoot
experience. He writes about how he and a friend were on a hunting trip in
the State of Washington. They had contracted a Native American to guide
them into a remote region. Their guide urged them to avoid a particular
area due to some native "superstition" that hunter-tracker Roosevelt held as
utterly preposterous.

In any event, old roughrider Roosevelt, as was his way sometimes, bullied
the apprehensive guide into taking them to this area anyway. They did not
find any big game during that trek or other sign but Roosevelt made a point
of mentioning the very strange noises he heard at night while camping there.
He did not recognize nor describe the noises, but he did give the distinct
impression that they were unusual in his learned experience and found them
to be unsettling. Uncharacteristically, Roosevelt did not offer any
explanation or speculation about the source of the noises, simply mentioned
them, and said no more about it. Odd for an author who otherwise went into
such vivid detail relative to the animals he observed and hunted.

While the killer creature was never given a clearly defined name, Bigfoot
buffs believe firmly that this creature was a Sasquatch but I could use some
measure of convincing. Taken on its own, the Bauman story is not very
impressive as evidence for the existence of wild men in North America, but
when considered along with the more substantive reports it acquires greater
significance. Ultimately, readers of these eyewitness accounts will be left
to judge for themselves the significance and value ostensibly placed on
these stories in the future.